Towards More Robust Outdoor Compute Vision: A Case Study on Haze

Speaker

Dr. Zhangyang Wang - Texas A&M University

Abstract

While many sophisticated models are developed for visual information processing, very few pay attention to their usability in the presence of data quality degradations. Most successful models are trained and evaluated on high quality visual datasets. On the other hand, the robustness of those computer vision models are often not assured in degraded visual environments. Especially for outdoor scenarios. low target resolution, occlusion, motion blur, missing data, poor light, and bad weather conditions, are all ubiquitous for visual recognition in the wild. In this talk, I will use haze as a case example, to introduce our progress on handling non-standard outdoor visual degradations, using deep learning methods. I will go through first single image dehazing, follow by video dehazing, then coming to introduce our recent benchmarking and evaluation efforts.

About the Speaker

Dr. Zhangyang (Atlas) Wang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), at the Texas A&M University (TAMU). During 2012-2016, he was a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working with Professor Thomas S. Huang. Prior to that, he obtained the B.E. degree at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), in 2012. He was a former research intern with Microsoft Research (summer 2015), Adobe Research (summer 2014), and US Army Research Lab (summer 2013). Dr. Wang’s research has been addressing machine learning, computer vision and multimedia signal processing problems, as well as their interdisciplinary applications, using advanced feature learning and optimization techniques. He has co-authored over 40 papers, and published several books and chapters. He has been granted 3 patents, and has received around 20 research awards and scholarships. He served as a guest editor for IEEE TNNLS and EURASIP JASP/JBSB; an Area Chair for ICIP 2017; a TPC co-chair for ICCV AMFG 2017; a special session co-chair for VCIP 2017; a tutorial organizer/speaker in SIAM IS 2018, CVPR 2017 and ECCV 2016; a workshop organizer in IEEE FG, IJCAI and SDM; and a regular reviewer or TPC member for around 40 top journals and conferences. His research has been covered by worldwide media, such as BBC, Fortune, International Business Times, TAMU news, and UIUC news & alumni magazine.